“Why, we’re nothing if not practical, you know, and as soon as we made that discovery we stopped killing ourselves and invented the summer resort. There are very few of our business or professional men now who don’t take their four or five weeks’ vacation. Their wives go off early in the summer, and, if they go to some resort within three or four hours of the city, the men leave town Saturday afternoon and run out, or come up, and spend Sunday with their families. For thirty-eight hours or so a hotel like this is a nest of happy homes.” “That is admirable,” said the Altrurian. “You are truly a practical people. The ladies come early in the summer, you say?” “Yes, sometimes in the beginning of June.” “What do they come for?” asked the Altrurian. “What for? Why, for rest!” I retorted, with some little temper. “But I thought you told me awhile ago that as soon as a husband could afford it he relieved his wife and daughters from all household work.” “So he does.” “Then what do the ladies wish to rest from?” “From care. It is not work alone that kills. They are not relieved from household care even when they are relieved from household work. There is nothing so killing as household care. Besides, the sex seems to be born tired. To be sure, there are some observers of our life who contend that with the advance of athletics among our ladies, with boating and bathing, and lawn-tennis and mountain-climbing and freedom from care, and these long summers of repose, our women are likely to become as superior to the men physically as they now are intellectually. It is all right. We should like to see it happen. It would be part of the national joke.” “Oh, have you a national joke?” asked the Altrurian. “But, of course! You have so much humor. I wish you could give me some notion of it.” “Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it,” I replied, “and your only hope of getting at ours is to live into it. One feature of it is the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men’s willingness to subordinate themselves to our women.” “Oh, I don’t find that very bewildering,” said the Altrurian. “It seems to me a generous and manly trait of the American character. I’m proud to say that it is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch. There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs must be of the greatest advantage to you; it has been so with us.” I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment, perhaps because it was now too dark for him to see it. “Our women have no influence in public affairs,” I said, quietly, after a moment. “They haven’t? Is it possible? But didn’t I understand you to imply just now that your women were better educated than your men?” “Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women are as a rule better schooled, if not better educated.” “Then, apart from the schooling, they are not more cultivated?”